Sunday, September 9, 2012

Darn, It's Happened Again - Abandoning Twitter

Every year or so, it happens. Educators, who have been using some great web-based service, suddenly find themselves asking the question, "Darn, it's happened again! They changed their cost model or approach. Should I switch?"

Some times, it's a happy ending (e.g. Diigo for Education, EverNote), often it's not and involves a commitment to pay on the part of educators who are cash-strapped and beset on all sides to do more with less. These are the risks one takes when appropriating public services out to make money. They give you everything for free up front, but once they have you hooked, they try to reel you in.

The "cost" can be financial or not. In the case of Twitter, we see that Twitter is abandoning RSS.While it was easy to see the loss of XML coming — Twitter has slowly dropped support for XML in favor of JSON over the last year and a half — dropping support for RSS and Atom is a major shift.

RSS and Atom are the two major formats for serving up web feeds. These feeds can include text, audio, video and other types of media. While most users use RSS as a way to subscribe to web content from a blog or podcast — the format can also be used as a way to subscribe to tweets...Apps that use RSS, XML or Atom will need to shift to JSON or other API methods by March 5, 2013.

It's funny because just this week, someone said to me, "A teacher wants to use Twitter to stay in-touch with students." I found myself sharing the use of Edmodo.com--the other shoe has yet to drop--and its RSS subscription feature.

What I imagined was a teacher updating twitter, then pulling in that content via RSS feed. Will that approach still work, or if I set it up, will it work in the future after March 5, 2013? I don't know.

In the meantime, I love this point:

If you build on top of someone else’s ecosystem, they can change the rules as they see fit, and there’s nothing you can do about it.